Guild Wars 2

Hello, forum! I am at a loss on how to get a guild started. I know how to create one, but how do I maintain one? I admit that I am not the most knowledgeable of guild leaders, but I thought long and hard about why I want to lead a guild. I guess I want to be a part of a group that grows together, from new players into veterans, if that makes any sense at all. I envision the guild to be less of a “I-lead-them-to-victory” and more of a “We-grow-together”. Because of my schedule and inexperience, the guild will be casual, social, and PVE-focused. Also, I hope for it to be a Christ-centered and family-friendly community. Is that asking for too much? Please help!

Once you have decided on a clear direction for your guild there are a few ways to find new members. You can ask players that you interact positively with in game if they are interested especially if they seem like they would fit in well with your guild objectives. Those are the players that are more likely to want to join and become good guild members. So in other words be social in game and try to find like minded players.

You can also post in the Looking For Forum with a good description of your guild and its mission. You can find that forum here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor

Although you may be tempted based on the the behavior of others, I would not suggest map spamming guild invites. I say this because in my opinion it is rather impersonal and I think a lot of people don’t care for it. Maybe once every now and then but don’t do it regularly. I tend to think of guilds that map spam as those just looking for numbers without really caring who joins and I just ignore them or block them if they do it too often. Just my 2 cents.

Additionally if you are certain you are dedicated to starting a guild you may want to set up a guild web page that will allow you to do things like post a guild calendar of events, message board and so forth. There are several resources that will allow you to do this at no cost or very little cost. With that you will probably want to look into having a guild voice server so your guild members can talk live while participating. These are all pluses a lot of people look for when joining a guild.

Thank you, JustTrogdor! Clear objective, be social, and don’t map spam. Got it.

A few important things for when your guild begins to grow:

a) Weekly guild events (i.e. guild missions, raids, fractals, PvE metas, x training runs, competitions, etc.) can really bring people together regularly and help people get to know each other. If you’re all unfamiliar with the content, reading/watching a few guides can help you grow together with less frustration, and can still give some sense of direction. It can be difficult to retain members for events if events keep failing week after week (probably don’t start with raids, but fractals are tiered!)

b) Having a good group of officers/leaders in the guild can help you manage these events. Otherwise, very often members gravitate toward a single guild leader for events, and if the leader can’t make it on for whatever reason (travel, real life obligations, etc), people can start feeling disconnected.

c) I totally second JustTrogdor on setting up a TS/Discord/other VoIP.

d) Making sure members are on the same page about what they’re signing up for. If the guild prohibits talking about politics in guild chat, make that clear. If your kick policy is one month of absence, have that somewhere for people to see. If you require 50% rep, have that written somewhere. You’re looking to create a faith-based guild—make that clear when someone signs up. This is obviously a litttle easier with a guild website.

Starting a guild can be difficult even in the best of times. Starting with no one but yourself, in a game that’s already pretty well saturated with established guilds, can be particularly challenging.

Rather than trying to build up a guild from ground zero, I would recommend first building up your own network of friends you enjoy playing with. Once you’ve found a core group of players that you mesh well with, ask if they’d like to start a guild with you. Starting a guild with a group you already get along with is much easier than pulling a bunch of random people together and trying to build a guild while also building relationships with one another. Especially when building a special-interest guild like you are (Christian, or at least “family friendly”), you want to make sure all your founding members have a consistent vibe, rather than pulling in a gaggle of strangers and hoping for some kind of consistency to materialize. Speaking from personal experience: some kind of consistency WILL materialize… but it might not be the consistency you were hoping for.

You may also want to consider joining an established guild, if you are not already part of one, and working your way into an officer position. While its possible for a guild to simply fly by the seat of their pants and have fun, most successful guilds have at least some behind-the-scenes logistics that keep them running smoothly. Even negative guild experiences can at least give you an idea of what you don’t want to do. (Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if you do the opposite of a guild leader you don’t like, that will make you a good guild leader. It’s not quite that black and white.)

Running your own guild can be fun, rewarding, stressful and exhausting all at the same time. Good luck!

Starting a guild and even inviting the first 10 members is easy. Not easy at all is keeping the guild alive for a longer time period. From every 10 newly invited members, only 1 is still active 1-2 weeks later. The others are gone. Inactive. Not logging on any more. This is not your fault! This is a natural thing in an MMO that happens for everyone.
Your everyday struggle is to invite new members to keep your member count, so the guild can be a source of collaborative play.

This is your daily struggle to keep the guild from falling apart until the guild developed a group of core members who are online (almost) daily and will not leave. This could happen perhaps 6 months after founding the guild.

A good organization of the guild, for example appointing the right guild officers, or operating a voip (Teamspeak) server, or performing guild activities, helps keeping all together. But it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is to keep the active member count. Without that, the guild is dead immediately.